Consumer Electronics Show 2004 Day 3 - And now, the rest of the story

Mobile Computing

Transmeta had a small but interesting booth at CES - as usual, a number of Crusoe based devices were on display but what was truly interesting was an Efficeon ultra thin-and-light notebook by Sharp.

The Efficeon is the much faster and long-awaited successor to the Transmeta Crusoe processor, built on a 0.13-micron process and running at 1GHz in Sharp's implementation.

Although the notebook features an ATI graphics solution, it uses a NVIDIA chipset - nForce3 150, basically the same chipset that is used with the Athlon 64 courtesy of the Efficeon's Hyper Transport bus and on-die memory controller.

Some Efficeon designs will also use NVIDIA's GeForce4 Go GPU.

An example of an Efficeon reference board

Above you can see a picture of the Efficeon processor itself, a 90nm version is in the works.

With the lid closed, the Sharp Efficeon notebook looks like any other ultra thin-and-light.

But opening it up reveals one surprise:

The switch pictured above will apparently switch between power modes on the notebook, an interesting feature although Transmeta's representatives were not able to provide any specific information about the feature. Most notebooks provide this feature as a software function, we're not certain why it would be necessary to have a physical switch, although it is useful.

What's truly impressive about the Sharp notebook are its specs - 2.1lbs and by the image above you can see how thick, or thin in this case, the notebook is.

Anand's thumb isn't thick, nor is this notebook.